President Barack Obama’s Nov. 21 pardons of three marijuana offenders are extremely unlikely to indicate any shift in the White House’s pot policies. The three had already served their sentences.
More important is his commutation of crack dealer Eugenia Jennings’ sentence, the first clemency request Obama has granted since he took office. Groups that advocate eliminating the difference between penalties for crack and powder cocaine pointed to her case as an example of the system’s injustice.
"Her case screamed out for commutation,” said Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project in Washington, DC.
Jennings, 34, of Alton, Illinois, will be released next month after serving 10 years in prison. A mother of three children, she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. Convicted of selling slightly less than a half-ounce of crack (actually, trading it to an undercover informant for designer clothing), she received a mandatory minimum sentence of 21 years and eight months because she had two previous convictions for selling about a gram of crack.
“Now is that fair? It’s not,” the judge who sentenced her in 2001 stated, “Your whole life has been a life of deprivation, misery, and whippings, and there’s no way to unwind that. But the truth of the matter is it’s not in my hands. As I told you, Congress has determined that the best way to deal with people who are troublesome is we just lock ‘em up.”
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